Taxxodium Wrote:To create pixel art, do I really need to make my drawing pixel by pixel or is there an easier way? Like using the pixelate filer in Photoshop?

Simple answer, No.

Often that is the way people do it but you can rotoscope (Scanner Darkly, taking a video or picture and painting over it) using tools like renderes and ratracers, (handy to get perspective or orientations properly) and painting over it.

Use whatever tools that will make life easier. Aside from outright stealing, nothing is verboten.

If it could have been done by filters, japanese game designers would have invented it.... doing it by hand isn't actually that slow. If you can already draw(or do cad like illustration) it should be easy.

Side notes:
By using a filter,ect, you lose control of how the pixelation responds/displays once said filter is applied.Leading to alot of clean-up.You also loose a major benifit of pixel art, and why its used. Pixel art was made for, and by game artists that had low or little ram/memory/disk space.When making textures for 3d(or 2d sprites) you should make them have as little impact on the engine as possible.More often than not, texture space is wasted(at least in games made in alot of western countrys).We like to just throw a better graphic card at the problem so we can use bigger textures(and waste more texture space). Did you know Playstation2 uses texture sizes 256x256 and smaller? Also, using 4-bit textures speeds 3d engines up alot! Maybe I just enjoy total control over the impact my models make in a game environment too much.

I have a couple ideas for image processing that would make pixel art creation better... I wanted to add it into the sprite artwork application that was starting to be developed here awhile ago. I unfortunately am not as familiar with Cocoa as I want to be to pull it off... but I may make a proof of concept just to show my idea. It would take greyscale line art and try to make pretty clean pixel art through the use of an algorithm. I'm not sure about fills, but who knows, with the right tweaking...

Pixel art by its very nature has "heart." It's a labor of love to make a sprite or texture pixel-by-pixel, and you can tell in the end result. Someone above mentioned 2D being "warmer" than 3D, and that's mostly true. I believe that pixel art can be brought into the 3D world quite successfully to make some really nice stuff. From a site linked above:

Sorry bout this but I posted a message about 2D Pixel artists needed and I don't know if it showed. Here's a brief description.

Hi there, this is a project being revived. I see big potential in this game, it is called Whispers in Akarra.

First of all! The spriting necessary for this game isn't that difficult but it has a theme that needs to be followed! 16x16 ingame and 32x32 inventory as well as possibly some portraits for NPC and building/spriteset spriting which would require bigger dimensions. If you feel interested in any of these domains email me at JohnPawlak@gmail.com

The game is a 2D Mmorpg that used to have 400-500 users playing it in its pre-alpha stages. The game runs while continualy being worked on. At the moment the game is down and big work is being done. The game has very good editors for each field, be it mapping, spriting, skills, effects, tileset, spriteset, creatureedit, itemedit and more.

The game is a medieval style mmorpg. The artists are not required to dedicate full time to this or even too much time. It is more of a help out when you can and get to know the team as well as grab some fame with the ever growing community.

**For the time being, the forums aren't populated since they have just gotted up and many old players are still lingering in distant web corners.

The artists would receive images of what the item/monsters/NPC's look like and would be able to either modify them or create new ones using the similar theme.